Russian agriculture and food processing: Vertical cooperation and spatial dynamics

Europe - Asia Studies

Volumn 53, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 389-418

  Ioffe, Grigory ^a,b   Nefedova, Tatyana ^a,b  

^a RADFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY   (Russian Federation)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION; FOOD PROCESSING; INDUSTRIAL LINKAGE; SPATIAL ANALYSIS; VERTICAL INTEGRATION;

RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 0034975114     PISSN: 09668136     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09668130120045861     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. The research leading to this article was funded by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (grant agreement No. 815-7 g).
2. A typical title from the Kennan Institute March 2000 Calendar reads 'Russia: New President, Same Old Politics?'. We understand that titles of public lectures have to be flashy to attract attention. However, this is also a surface expression of a fairly tenacious trend. So taking the title at face value one can't resist a counter-question: 'Same old politics? Why on earth should they be new?'
3. Incidentally, the book by Jacques Sapir, Le krach russe, one of the most cataclysmic accounts of the August 1998 devaluation, was published in 1998 (Editions La Decouverte), shortly after the event. The book's Russian translation was released at the end of 1999; in May 2000 it was still on sale in the biggest bookstore in Moscow. By that time, however, the dissonance between a groundbreaking assessment of the barely 1.5-2-year old event contained in that book and the current calm attitude toward it was all too apparent. If this was the case in Moscow, whose ties with the outside world have made Muscovites most vulnerable to financial upheavals, many Russian provinces probably did not even blink in August 1998.
4. Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia (Boulder, Westview Press, 1997); Grigory Ioffe, 'Continuity in Rural Russia', Central Asia between Russia and the Middle East: Land Reform, Environment Constraints, and Rural Development (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2001).
5. Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia (Boulder, Westview Press, 1997); Grigory Ioffe, 'Continuity in Rural Russia', Central Asia between Russia and the Middle East: Land Reform, Environment Constraints, and Rural Development (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2001).
6. Rossiya v tsifrakh (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1999), pp. 202-209.
7. Ibid., p. 203. The issue of why Western-style family farming has no reasonable prospects in Russia was addressed in Ioffe & Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia.
8. Ibid., p. 203. The issue of why Western-style family farming has no reasonable prospects in Russia was addressed in Ioffe & Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia.
9. Stephen K. Wegren, 'From Farm to Table: the Food System in Post-Communist Russia', Communist Economies & Economic Transformation, 8, 2, 1996, pp. 149-183.
10. According to an anonymous reviewer, this term is bothersome and confusing. While this may indeed be the case, the economy in transition does not lend itself to well-established and clear-cut terminology. Moreover, the proposed substitutes, like 'former collective farms' and 'large agricultural enterprises', are even more confusing because they emphasise aspects (former status and size) that are not pivotal to the substance conveyed. The term 'socialised' is akin to 'collective' and 'communal' and emphasises what they have in common without pointing either to former status (which could be state or collective) or size (which in fact ranges from 20 to over 1000 people). Furthermore, the term 'socialised' is not construed as an allusion to a type of socioeconomic and political system at large. After all, 'socialised healthcare' is not uncommon under a market economy.
11. Maria Amelina, 'What turns a kolkhoz into a firm?', Adaptation and Change in Rural Russia (Washington DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000).
12. Alexander Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Co-Operatives (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1991) (translation from the 1927 edition), p. 210.
13. John H. Davis & Ray A. Goldberg, A Concept of Agribusiness (Boston, Harvard University, 1957), p. 2.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 31.
16. Frederick P. Stutz & Antony R. de Souza, The World Economy (Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 245.
17. Sarah Whatmore, 'From Farming to Agribusiness: the Global Agrifood System', in R. J. Johnston, P. J. Taylor, & M. J. Watts (eds), Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World in the Late 20th Century (London, Blackwell, 1995), pp. 3-49.
18. Patrick Hart, 'Marketing Agricultural Produce', in Ian R. Bowler (ed.), The Geography of Agriculture in Developed Market Economies (Essex, Longman, 1992), p. 194.
19. Ibid.
20. The demographic aspect of this statement is substantiated in several publications, including Stephen K. Wegren, Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, 'Demographic and Migratory Responses to Agrarian Reform in Russia', Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 13, 4, 1997, pp. 54-78. The human capital aspect of this statement is not supported by any formal research known to us and thus constitutes our informal but expert judgment. It is derived from our field trips. For example, during our most recent trip to Ryazan oblast' (May 2000) we did not encounter an adult male after 5 p.m. on a weekday who was not blind drunk. Many sober men could in fact be spotted in the city of Ryazan itself at any time of the day, but not in the small towns and their agricultural hinterlands. The chairman of the raion administration in Kasimov, Ryazan' oblast', recognised that the only reason they have not disbanded their seven chronically unprofitable socialised farms is because 'people have nowhere else to go'. He thus acknowledged what has been known all along, namely that in many places in Russia socialised farms have been not so much production units as vehicles of collective survival. Survival of the weakest. Another glimpse of reality: in the summer of 2000 villagers in Pskov oblast' repeatedly pulled down electric wires to sell them as non-ferrous scrap metal to illicit buyers. As a result, dozens of rural villages in the oblast' stayed without electricity for weeks. According to Governor Mikhailov of Pskov, 800(!) people perished dismantling these wires between April and June 2000. This is more than twice as many as those killed in combat in Chechnya during the same time. (The case is reported in Izvestiya, 7 July 2000.) And this is just in one oblast'. The above may seem to be disconnected cases not worthy of generalisation. We tend to think that they are, as we have encountered all too many instances of them over 25 years of field trips in rural Russia. The bottom line is that these observations invoke the type of social environment, which is not conducive to any meaningful reform whatsoever. Therefore, it seems to us that all the other obstacles in the way of agrarian reform in Russia (e.g. legal hurdles or price differentials) pale beside the quality of human capital left in the countryside. We see this as an accumulated result of a long-lasting self-selection that accompanied rural out-migration in Russia for decades whereby the most enterprising, skilful and independent-minded left for the city, while the most passive, resigned and prone to heavy drinking stayed. This has been especially the case in the non-chernozem periphery. The environs of large cities are in much better shape (see Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, 'Environs of Russian Cities: A Case Study of Moscow', Europe-Asia Studies, 50, 8, 1998, pp. 1325-1356). Piedmont provinces of the Northern Caucasus and Siberian regions are in better shape as well.
21. The demographic aspect of this statement is substantiated in several publications, including Stephen K. Wegren, Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, 'Demographic and Migratory Responses to Agrarian Reform in Russia', Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 13, 4, 1997, pp. 54-78. The human capital aspect of this statement is not supported by any formal research known to us and thus constitutes our informal but expert judgment. It is derived from our field trips. For example, during our most recent trip to Ryazan oblast' (May 2000) we did not encounter an adult male after 5 p.m. on a weekday who was not blind drunk. Many sober men could in fact be spotted in the city of Ryazan itself at any time of the day, but not in the small towns and their agricultural hinterlands. The chairman of the raion administration in Kasimov, Ryazan' oblast', recognised that the only reason they have not disbanded their seven chronically unprofitable socialised farms is because 'people have nowhere else to go'. He thus acknowledged what has been known all along, namely that in many places in Russia socialised farms have been not so much production units as vehicles of collective survival. Survival of the weakest. Another glimpse of reality: in the summer of 2000 villagers in Pskov oblast' repeatedly pulled down electric wires to sell them as non-ferrous scrap metal to illicit buyers. As a result, dozens of rural villages in the oblast' stayed without electricity for weeks. According to Governor Mikhailov of Pskov, 800(!) people perished dismantling these wires between April and June 2000. This is more than twice as many as those killed in combat in Chechnya during the same time. (The case is reported in Izvestiya, 7 July 2000.) And this is just in one oblast'. The above may seem to be disconnected cases not worthy of generalisation. We tend to think that they are, as we have encountered all too many instances of them over 25 years of field trips in rural Russia. The bottom line is that these observations invoke the type of social environment, which is not conducive to any meaningful reform whatsoever. Therefore, it seems to us that all the other obstacles in the way of agrarian reform in Russia (e.g. legal hurdles or price differentials) pale beside the quality of human capital left in the countryside. We see this as an accumulated result of a long-lasting self-selection that accompanied rural out-migration in Russia for decades whereby the most enterprising, skilful and independent-minded left for the city, while the most passive, resigned and prone to heavy drinking stayed. This has been especially the case in the non-chernozem periphery. The environs of large cities are in much better shape (see Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, 'Environs of Russian Cities: A Case Study of Moscow', Europe-Asia Studies, 50, 8, 1998, pp. 1325-1356). Piedmont provinces of the Northern Caucasus and Siberian regions are in better shape as well.
22. Chayanov, p. 8.
23. Ibid., p. 209.
24. Soisial'no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii 1999 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 2000) pp. 52-55.
25. O. Melyukhina & E. Serova, 'K probleme monopolizma v sfere pererabotki sel'skokhozyaistvennoi produktsii', Voprosy ekonomiki, 1995, 1, pp. 66-75.
26. A significant portion of these surpluses was being sold through urban kolkhoznye rynki that were expanded. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s kolkhoz markets in Russian cities were primitive open-air retail facilities with rows of crumbling wooden counters, in the early 1970s these retail facilities began to undergo the most profound transformation they had ever experienced. New cavernous pavilions with concave roofs were replacing open-air flea market settings. Modern construction materials were used. Scales and other equipment could be rented. Storage facilities and refrigerators were added and the overall capacity and quality of retail transactions increased - also in part because of the instituting of sanitary controls. Ironically, this was all done by the state (as pretty much everything was in the USSR in those days) that would have been expected to be shifting more food through state channels while limiting independent market outlets. In Moscow alone about two dozen kolkhoz markets were modernised and expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, in St Petersburg about a dozen, and from one to four in each provincial centre.
27. A. Zel'dner, 'Gosudarstvennoe regulirovanie agropromyshlennogo sektora ekonomiki', Voprosy ekonomiki, 1997, 6, pp. 83-91.
28. I. Khramova, & P. Verkhaim, 'Rynochnaya struktura prodovol'stvennogo kompleksa Rossii v usloviyakh perekhodnoi ekonomiki', Voprosy ekonomiki, 1997, 8, pp. 112-120.
29. Sel'skoe khozyaistvo v Rossii 1998 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1999), p. 94.
30. Ibid.
31. Melyukhina & Serova, 'K probleme monopolizma v sfere pererabotki sel'skokhozyaistvennoi produktsii'.
32. E. Serova & R. Yanbykh, 'Gosudarstvennye programmy podderzhki sel'skokhozyaistvennogo kredita v perekhodnykh ekonomikakh', Voprosy ekonomiki, 1998, 11, pp. 127-133.
33. Ibid.
34. Semen Novoprudsky, 'Nastuplenie na grabli', Izvestiya, 13 May 2000, p. 2.
35. Russian Financial Empires, www.rferl.org/nca/special/rufinance/sbs-agro.html (viewed in April 2000).
36. 'Ot polya do prilavka', Expert, 12 April 1999.
37. Igor Ivanov, 'Slishkom mnogo khochet. Rossel'khozbank pogubyat ego appetity', Izvestiya, 5 October 2000, p. 2.
38. Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, 'Areas of crisis in Russian Agriculture: a Geographic Perspective', Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 41, 4, 2000, pp. 233-250.
39. Ibid., p. 234.
40. Grigory Ioffe, 'Continuity in Rural Russia', Central Asia between Russia and the Middle East: Land Reform, Environment Constraints, and Rural Development (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2000).
41. B.I. Poshkus, 'Mesto LPKh v sel'skoi ekonomike', Razvitie lichnykhpodsobnykh khozyaistv kak odin iz mekhanizmov povysheniya dokhodov sel'skogo naseleniya (Moscow, Minsel'khozprod, 1999), p. 11.
42. Chislennost' naseleniya Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1999), pp. 22-27.
43. Ioffe & Nefedova, 'Areas of Crisis in Russian Agriculture: a Geographic Perspective'.
44. Ibid.
45. Rossiya v tsifrakh 1999, p. 175.
46. Ioffe & Nefedova, 'Areas of Crisis in Russian Agriculture: a Geographic Perspective'.
47. Regiony Rossii 1998 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 2000), p. 338.
48. Sel'skoe khozyaistvo v Rossii 1998 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1999), pp. 196-197.
49. Evgeniya Serova, 'Medlennyi pod"em', Krest'yanskie vedomosti, 28 February-5 March 2000.
50. 'V Peterburge produktovyi boom', Izvestiya, 11 November 1998.
51. Vladimir Kalmanov, 'Myasopoval', Profil', 10 April 2000, p. 51.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. 'Expert-100. Reputation', Expert, 17 May 1999.
55. 'Pivovarennyi Gigant', Kommersant, 14 January 2000.
56. 'Expert-200. Ezhegodnyi rating krupneishikh kompanii', Expert, 27 September 1999.
57. 'Zheltaya reka', Profil', 8 May 2000, p. 26.
58. Ibid., pp. 26-29.
59. 'Expert-200. Ezhegodnyi rating krupneishikh kompanii', Expert, 27 September 1999.
60. Rossiya v tsifrakh 1999, p. 197.
61. Nikolai Petrov, 'Vodochnaya Rossiya', Regiony Rossii v 1998 godu (Moscow, Carnegie Center, 1999), pp. 239-246.
62. Rossiya v tsifrakh 1999, p. 197.
63. Petrov, 'Vodochnaya Rossiya'.
64. Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, The Environs of Russian Cities (Lewiston, Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), p. 89.
65. Viktoriya Averbukh et al., 'Pokupayut doktorskuyu. Otlichnaya kolbasa!', Izvestiya, 17 February 2000.
66. www.wbd.ru/win1251/about/frabout.html (read in December 1999).
67. Viktor Filippov, 'Ukradennaya slava', Izvestiya, 13 May 1999.
68. Rossiya v tsifrakh 1999, p. 344.
69. Ibid., p. 346.
70. 'Uspekhi shokoladnykh korolei', Expert, 2 February 1998.
71. www.mcdonalds.com/countries/russia/russia.html (read in June 2000).
72. Ibid.
73. 'Rossiiskie produkty', Izvestiya, 12 March 1999.
74. Rinat Sagdiev, 'Eugurtovye reki', Izvestiya, 20 June 2000, p. 2.
75. Aleksei Khazbiev, 'Pivnoi blitskrig [Blitzkrieg]', Expert, 19 January 1998, pp. 42-44.
76. Sergei Muravev, 'Krizis vpolne s"edoben', Izvestiya, 11 February 1999.
77. Sagdiev, 'Eugurtovye reki', Izvestiya, 20 June 2000, p. 2.
78. 'Sel'khozintegratsiya', Expert, 8 February 1999.
79. 'Mafiya razumnogo biznesa', Expert, 19 January 1998.
80. 'Sel'khozintegratsiya', Expert, 8 February 1999.
81. Viktor Filippov, 'Moskva stroit v Kadnikove Kapitalizm s Chelovecheskim Litsom', Izvestiya, 24 June 1998, p. 4.
82. Viktor Filippov, 'Derevnya vytaskivaet sebya za volosy iz tryasiny', Izvestiya, 10 February 2000, p. 4.
83. V. Semenov, 'My pytaemsya kontrolirovat' techenie beremennosti', Kommersant, 23 December 1998; V. Semenov, 'Nastoyashchii Klondike', Expert, 30 November 1998.
84. V. Semenov, 'My pytaemsya kontrolirovat' techenie beremennosti', Kommersant, 23 December 1998; V. Semenov, 'Nastoyashchii Klondike', Expert, 30 November 1998.
85. Natalya Zubarevich & Andrei Treivish, 'Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Regionov', Regiony Rossii v 1998 Godu (Moscow, Carnegie Center, 1998), pp. 94-103.
86. Ioffe & Nefedova, 'Areas of Crisis in Russian Agriculture: a Geographic Perspective', p. 243.
87. Ibid.
88. Regiony Rossii 1998, vol. 2 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 2000) p. 380.
89. Wimm Bill Dann, for example, has contracts with or has bought up shares in scores of ex-urban medium-size dairy processing plants. They have abandoned most of their own production and currently work as intermediaries, collecting milk from local dairy farms and passing it on to four outsized processing plants based in the city of Moscow. Smaller milk-processing plants survive in some cases as independent producers of a diverse assortment of foods (e.g. sour cream, cottage cheeses, etc.) only at a significant distance from large provincial centres. Such plants also form their supply zones on the basis of the most efficient local farms and sometimes buy them up. A case study of Elat'ma Milk Processor (Kasimov raion, Ryazan oblast') will be taken up in one of our future publications.
90. Personal interview, 7 June 2000.
91. See especially Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia (Boulder, Westview Press, 1997), chapter 10 and Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, 'Russian Agriculture: Spatial Contrasts and the Potential for Revival', Adaptation and Change in Rural Russia (Washington DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001).
92. See especially Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, Continuity and Change in Rural Russia (Boulder, Westview Press, 1997), chapter 10 and Grigory Ioffe & Tatyana Nefedova, 'Russian Agriculture: Spatial Contrasts and the Potential for Revival', Adaptation and Change in Rural Russia (Washington DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001).
93. G. V. Ioffe, Sel'skoe khozyaistvo nechernozemya: territorial'nye problemy (Moscow, Nauka, 1990), pp. 90-91.
94. Ioffe & Nefedova, 'Environs of Russian Cities: A Case Study of Moscow', Europe-Asia Studies, 50, 8, 1998, pp. 1329, 1340-1345.
95. C. R. Bryant & T. R. R. Johnson, Agriculture in the City's Countryside (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 25-26.
96. Ioffe, Sel'skoe Khozyaistvo Nechernozemya: territorial'nye problemy, pp. 50-51.
97. Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik 1996 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1997), p. 547; Sel'skoe khozyaistvo v Rossii (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1998), p. 81.
98. Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik 1996 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1997), p. 547; Sel'skoe khozyaistvo v Rossii (Moscow, Goskomstat, 1998), p. 81.
99. Calculated on the basis of Zemel'nyi Fond RSFSR (Moscow, TsSU RSFSR, 1961); Zemel'nyi Fond RSFSR (Moscow, Finansy i Statistika, 1990).
100. Calculated on the basis of Zemel'nyi Fond RSFSR (Moscow, TsSU RSFSR, 1961); Zemel'nyi Fond RSFSR (Moscow, Finansy i Statistika, 1990).
101. Anastasiya Shvedova, 'Shotlandskii karavai. Inostrannyi plug borozdit rossiiskoe pole', Izvestiya, 14 September 2000, p. 2.